To understand why the Hudson Bay Company might have wanted to destroy the stock of beavers in the Snake River country, it’s helpful to go back to 1809, when John Jacob Astor, […]
36. Alliances and the Mountains: War by Other Means, Part 3.
34. War by Other Means, Part 1
In my last post https://okanaganokanogan.com/2022/11/22/39-you-say-skaha-i-say-sqexeʔ/, number 33 in this series, I pointe out that even the simple concepts that determine human relationships to land today, things universally dispersed or at least fought […]
31. Humans and Bears and History
As I hope my post yesterday made clear, traditional Indigenous cultures are as dynamic as European ones and European ones are as constant as traditional Indigenous ones. We can have a sentence […]
30. Weaponizing the West: Part 2
The Americans who arrived on the Columbia in the 1830s and 1840s said that their power came from their God. The power was certainly there, and the zeal. From 1790 through 1840, […]
28. The Spiritual Power of Horses in Old Oregon
To recap: the extensive Indigenous slave trade with the Spanish in the Southwest, and a fight for new technology (the horse), drove Indigenous cultural change on the western edges of New France […]
27. Manipulating the French in the Northwest
The last time we were together, I spoke as a land of grass and rocks, enslaved to inter-human relations west of the Rocky Mountains. There’s a story out this way, that people […]
26. Enslaving the Land
Now that this story has walked a ways into life in the grassland, as opposed to life in a Euroamerican context… Converted to Apartments for Seniors and a Thai Restaurant …and now […]
20. What is a River?
Wikipedia is basic about this: A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground […]
Pacific Northwest Playground
We have past the best before date for North American colonial culture. We’re just playing out our roles now. That is, until we set new ones. I’ll be back with our historical […]
The Crooked Path to the Water
I’m off gathering for a spell. While I’m gone, here’s an image from the McNary National Wildlife Preserve (in the U.S. land claim), taken at a distance so the shotgun shell casings […]
Okanagan Okanogan 